[This primiere publication
represents many years of the author's work teaching mythology
at the Academy of the New Church in Bryn Athyn, Pennsylvania. See
Introduction.]

[NOTICE;
THIS BOOK IS A "PRE-PUBLICATION" VERSION.IT IS STILL IN THE PROCESS
OF REFINEMENT, INCLUDING PROOFREADING, FORMATTING, SPELLCHECKING, ETC. THERE
WILL ALSO BE PICTURES INCLUDED IN FINAL VERSION.]

Friends
and family tell me I should write a book but my days are getting shorter and
the days of this year are getting longer. My grandchildren and garden call!
Hollyhocks and Lavender need to be dug. My fence needs painting. Thyme needs
replanting and Rosemary-ah "Rosemary is for Remembrance." There's the
answer! One of the sweet sorrows of old age is not so much that we forget, it
is that we remember too many times over. In the thirty years of responding to
speaking invitations I have probably written at least once anything I might
have to contribute at this time. Now I know why I have kept an orderly
chronological file of papers and addresses beginning in 1971.

So, with the forgiveness of any possible reader, rather than write a new
"book," I will rearrange for republication my file by topics
introduced by each of the five days' summary lectures given at Eldergarten '96.
Reprints of each paper already published will happily find comfortable homes
under one of those days' topics because the human mind has a beautiful hidden
way of unifying and organizing oft repeated ideas. Then I can get back to the
important task of getting ahead of the weeds of my garden and, more important,
see the correspondence of that activity to the primary task of divesting myself
of the weeds of my soul.

This
collection represents a modest attempt to gather together some of my myth
studies for the sake of posterity, for my personal family and for the church
family whoever may be interested in carrying on the beloved tradition of
Correspondences research. My studies have been made in an effort to link some
of the early Conference and General Church and other 19th Century
secular Mythology studies to more recent scholarship of the 20thCentury.
Between the two World Wars there seemed to be very little interest in pursuing
myth studies within the church or in the world at large, but now their is
certainly the dawn of a "new age." The recent awakening of interest
has ignited a new age of secular scholarship in occult subjects. The light that
these studies have thrown on the better understanding of inner meaning, "correspondences,"
has refueled for me an early burning quest.

It
probably all started with my beautiful Mother, a veritable Greek goddess,
reading to me from the colorful book Myths and Enchantment Tales with
its idyllic illustrations by Margaret Evans Price. No ugly demons or worlds
created by turtles pictured here, but lovely Persephone eating the six
pomegranate seeds; she was shown in this book having been kidnapped by a not-
too-scary Hades whose flaming cape described not a devil but a god of a
colorful underworld kingdom of precious gems, a mineral kingdom.

Somewhere along the path of my Girls Seminary education we copied pictures of
Egyptian gods and symbols from C.T.Odhner's Correspondences of Egypt. History
teacher, Vera Bergstrom, inspired us with the graphic assignment of depicting
symbolically the History of the Churches in chart form. I chose for my
illustration a picture in the Price book of the glorious Sun God Apollo
surrounded by the Four Seasons, to represent the Crown of All Churches amidst
the historical progressions of the earlier FourChurches.

My
youthful intention was never to be a teacher and follow in that dreary family
tradition. My earliest interest, aside from making a home for my many dolls,
was that of being a detective, following in Sherlock Holmes' foot prints with
spyglass and scientific deduction. Mother modified this with the suggestion
that I might want to be an Archeologist.

How
marvelously the stream of Providence leads us. When I was about to be a senior
in the Academy College, Bishop de Charms called me into his office, and with my
mother present, told me he had asked her to leave the teaching of her Girls
Seminary courses so that she could become Dean of Women and Sociology/Astronomy
teacher in the college. He then asked me if I would pick up her term of Church
History for sophomores and a term of Mythology for seniors while I was
finishing college. Teaching! I must have said yes, because I taught those
courses that year and was employed to continue them in addition to a full time
assignment of other courses, for the next two years until I was married in
1949. I was hooked.

Retiring
to raise a family for twenty years, I was called back to an exiting career when
the Girls School Faculty was faced with a large enrollment and the staffing of
a challenging new curriculum in the fall of 1969. How the doors opened! Once
again after twenty years of offering no separate courses of Mythology and
Church History we were going to offer two heavily enrolled one-term sections of
Mythology! Sadly, the colorful courses in Church History are buried, if they
exist at all, within small more cognitive units of Religion classes. Gone are
the colorful history charts, but beginning was a twenty-year offering of two
term sections of Mythology every year. That too is gone with my retirement, but
hopefully my enthusiastic army of girls will someday insist on its return to
the curriculum, because it is not merely a study of Mythology as might be found
in any school but an approach to the study of Correspondences through
Mythology.

Approaching my new assignment with great energy I started buying all the books
on the market on Mythology, and there was suddenly a flood of them. With the
flower children of the 60's and 70's came an intellectual revolution of occult
studies. Hard sciences gave way to serious studies of psychological and
imaginative research into meaning. Searching for meaning again became as
popular as it had been in the 19th Century. What a feast for a
one-time detective! Search for the Grail became, of course, search for the
Ancient Word. To me that quest would not be geographic. As I told my friends,
no sand pits and gritty sifting for me, bring me the reports from the thirsty
snake pits of the Middle East and I will study them with my feet in a Roman
fountain. Seriously, my interest was in understanding the ancient language of
correspondences because I believe if and when we find parchments or traces of
the Ancient Word we may not be able to understand their meaning unless
we engulf ourselves within the study of the meaning and milieu of ancient
writing.

It was English Department Head, Lyris
Hyatt, who assigned this course to me and it was Lyris Hyatt who, in 1971, as
program chairman for the General Faculty's monthly meetings, said she had
noticed that I had been making some interesting looking studies and invited me
to speak to the Faculties in November of 1971. It was the paper I gave at that
time which seemed to open so many incredible doors for me and, I hope,
benefited the Academy in spreading anew the interest in the beloved Tradition.
It is with that paper, as it was published in New Church Life in February and
March of '72, which I have selected to introduce this collection of papers and
addresses. The title of the paper was: Search for the Ancient Word through
Myths and Correspondences. This launched my humble career as a searcher for
meaning in ancient writings and, not incidentally, this paper led to the
incredibly exiting revival of the old Academy Museum and the organization of
the Ancient Church Conference of 1975. Although I have no claim to real scholarship
I have the true amateur's love of studying and preserving the New Church
tradition of Correspondences studies. I have a deep concern that precious
traditions, especially the study of Correspondences beyond the strictly
theological studies, not be forgotten and that future students of the New
Church will at least be able to build upon and develop further some of the work
of earlier days.